Bora Lee is the Manager of Customer Enablement at ChurnZero. She is passionate about helping customer success teams succeed by crafting big-picture strategies executed through automated, streamlined processes that put the right data in front of the right customer at exactly the right time. She works hand in hand with customer success leaders to create fruitful, long-term relationships and to maximize customer satisfaction. In her free time, you will find her scuba diving and traveling.
Since customer success (CS) is still an emerging field, it’s not uncommon to find CS leaders who are founding their company’s first CS team or creating CS processes from scratch. Being the new department on the block, you may have had to find workarounds to other team’s more established processes. Or you might have encountered the common workplace scenario of inheriting your predecessor’s way of working.
No matter how your processes came to be, I can tell you one thing: they’re not perfect.
You can’t put your processes on a pedestal or become complacent with their adherence. Your market, solutions, and customers are constantly evolving. Your processes must adapt to the people and to the context – not the other way around.
Especially when you’re implementing CS processes for the very first time, it’s impossible to account for the multiple variances that will occur when you put concept into practice.
Instead of striving for process perfection, a goal more worthy of your efforts is the continuous improvement of your processes – routinely assessing their design, usage, output, and effectiveness.
And that’s where audits come in. By auditing your processes, you can uncover if dips in your performance metrics are merely a fluke or perhaps the cause of an undiagnosed bottleneck. Or if outwardly unrelated customer complaints actually stem from the same source.
As you audit over time, your small incremental efficiency gains add up. Consistent and measured refinement is the key to sustainable growth.
When auditing, it’s all about asking the right questions to uncover both the visible and underlying issues in your processes. To keep your customer success operations running smoothly, in this Process Street article, we’ve detailed a few simple, yet commonly overlooked questions to ask during your next process audit:
- Does your process align with your team’s responsibilities?
- What parts of your process generate the most feedback?
- Outside of the process, what other work does your team perform?
- Where do you have process bottlenecks?
- Where’s your team spending too much time?
- How should the process ideally work?
- Are you getting the data you need?
Let’s get right to it!
Continue Reading